The search for any form of life in space might have been narrowed down to a specific lake-bearing basin on Mars, says a trio of NASA scientists.
Billions of years ago, the planet was once surfaced with several bodies of water and large oceans, however, currently the planet has no liquid. But where there was once water is typically an indicator that there was once life.
It has been assumed that the planet, which was once submerged with water, experienced evaporation more than once—at least, according to a recent paper that was published in Geology. The paper suggests that Mars actually had a second wave of water surfacing the planet 200 million years after science assumed the planet had seen its last wave of water. That's 3.6 billion years ago.
The water was pinpointed to a specific lake 100 miles away from where NASA's Opportunity rover currently is situated: it was a lake within a basin located nearby the Martian equator. As it is one of the youngest known lakes to scientists, it is potentially the very last possible water banks to exist on the planet.
"Having a later stage of water on Mars is probably a good thing for the potential for life on that planet because it gave life more time to be conceived," says Brian Hynek, a research associate at the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at Colorado University-Boulder. "There was life on Earth when this lake was active so by that analogy, we can say there's potential that Mars had microbial life and this was a great place where it could have resided," he told Business Insider during an interview.
Currently there are no plans for researchers to visit this basin in order to locate signs of life, however, Hynek does hope that it can become a popular location for the NASA Mars rover to touch down during the 2020 launch.
There are other indicators, outside of a previously existing lake, that imply that there may have been life that once existed in the basin, specifically low salt content, which Hynek says would have been ideal for life.
[via Business Insider]
